IL's Biggest 15: Off-Set Technology, the Brine Edge

Inside Lacrosse is celebrating 15 years of being The Source of the Sport. To commemorate our 15th year, we're counting down the biggest 15 stories of the IL Era. Coming in at No. 10 is a technological development that helped usher in the modern era of lacrosse: the offset head.

Casey Vock, editor of ILGear.com, talks to key figures in the development of offset technology, focusing on the head that changed it all: the Brine Edge. Interviews with Bill Brine himself and legendary stick-maker Alf Jacques shed new light on a big development in lacrosse history.

For those who've studied the lacrosse stick itself, the sport's progression could be divided into periods based on developments in stick technology, which have been essential to the growth of the sport.

While the introduction of the plastic head, which occurred from the late 1960s into the early 1970s, is thought by many to have ushered in the new era of lacrosse, all signs point to the introduction of off-set technology as being a crucial development in the modern era that helped increase the speed of lacrosse and has made the game itself more accessible to the thousands of kids who take it up each year.

And when it comes to off-set technology, the one stick that changed the game more than any other is the Brine Edge.

With its development going back as far as 1994, the Edge is the creation of Bill Brine, whose family founded and operated W. H. Brine Company near Boston for decades before the brand was switched to just "Brine."

The original founder of Sport Helmets, which eventually changed its name to Cascade Sports and was later bought by Bauer Sports, Brine had located the company just outside of Syracuse. He'd witnessed two of the games greatest players — Orange legends Gary and Paul Gait — using slightly bent aluminum shafts, which drew the interest of many players and fans in the area.

"People were saying, 'what is so magical about what they're doing with their shafts,'" says Brine. "No one could duplicate [the Gaits' play], so I eventually thought to myself that they were just good players, and that made the difference."

But he later learned that the slight bend in the shaft, done by applying some pressure to an aluminum handle over something like a fence post, created what he referred to as "a tactile" difference in how the stick felt, helping a player have an improved "feel" through a better sense of the stick's rotational orientation, by way of a lower center of gravity in the pocket region.

"The tactile response was a way to feel which way the face of the stick was facing — knowing which way was up," said Brine, who recalled his days as a young crease attackman at The Governor's Academy, when it was common to catch an inside feed on the backside of his stick while fighting through traffic.

And so he went to work on a prototype. He attached a Brine Oz — a popular non-offset model — to a wood handle and then cut the shaft off right at the bottom of the throat of the plastic. Then, he attached the head to an aluminum shaft by screwing the top of the metal shaft to the front of the neck of the stick, directly over the piece of wood left in the plastic head.

Within about 10 minutes, Brine had created the prototype of a stick that would become the most popular of its time and would forever change the game.

"And just like that, my problem was solved," Brine says, adding that he threw a ball against a wall three times and he knew instantly that the intended effect was created.

"It gave me a great tactile feel for where the head was. At that time, most of the new heads out there had aimed to be as balanced as possible. … That tactile feel was created by relocating the pocket from being on the same plane as your hand. It put your hand on one plane and the pocket on another. That is the underlying concept."

However, Brine's first creation was off-set by an entire shaft, meaning the face of the stick and the pocket were shifted down by more than one inch.

"Too much," Brine thought, and then worked to create several models of the stick, experimenting with different depths and ultimately cutting the amount of off-set down to a point he said felt "ideal."

"And that is what ended up on the Edge," he says, adding that he didn't have to look too far for a name he liked. When working to commercialize the new design, Brine had a can of Edge shaving cream on his desk. And that was it.

"I was looking for something short and catchy, something non-descriptive and edgy," Brine says. "It hit all of those. I think I had that can on my desk for about three years."

Brine, who jokes that he was given no more than $10 by his family for the design, filed for the patent on Dec. 5, 1995, according to the U.S. Patent Office's records.

By 1996, the Edge was starting to appear on lacrosse fields throughout the northeast and was working its way across the continent.

For John Tavares, who began his professional career in Buffalo in 1992, his move to plastic sticks came when he was told he couldn't use a wooden box stick in the then Major Indoor Lacrosse League. After using wooden, hand-made sticks throughout his Junior career, the NLL's all-time goals, assists and points leaders says he struggled to make the move to plastic and metal.

"When I started with Buffalo, I was still using wood for summer lacrosse," Tavares says. "It was a very hard transition for me. In the summers after that, I would continue to use wood."

That transition was helped, Tavares says, when he began using sticks from one of the other early-movers in off-set technology, Mohawk International Lacrosse, a Cornwall Island-based business that still produces many of the wood sticks used in Ontario and New York.

Tavares was actually sponsored by the company, and when he tried out some of the off-set heads Mohawk International (now known simply as Mohawk Lacrosse) introduced after the Edge, he said it helped him finally feel good about using plastic.

"With leather and traditional sticks, you can feel the ball in the stick more," Tavares says. "The off-set heads made me more comfortable (with plastic). I like to know where the ball is in my stick."

Comfort, Onondaga wood stick maker Alf Jacques says, has always been the goal of innovations in stick technology — something he's followed and his father, Louis, studied before passing the craft down to him.

"If you look back at the 1800s and into the early 1900s, there were no pockets at all compared to what there should have been," Jacques says. "It just made it hard to hold, cradle and shoot the ball."

By the 1970s, with the increased popularity of high school and college lacrosse, Jacques says sticks began to change. (Many of those changes can be seen via ILGear.com's Vintage Vault, which features many sticks considered innovative at the time they were introduced.)

"When they got to plastics, it was a similar situation to the wood sticks — pockets were flat and straight. Pocket depth was always an issue."

West Genesee coach Mike Messere, who used a wood stick in his playing days, recalls that before the proliferation of off-set technology, players were tweaking their sticks to get any advantage they could.

"In my day with wooden sticks, it was tilting the (gut) stoppers back or putting a dip in the middle of the stopper so the ball would kind of sit behind it a bit," Messere said to ILGear.com when interviewed about the NCAA's newly passed stick stringing rules for 2013. "It's like an ongoing process."

Decades ago, Jacques and his father had already created what they considered off-set wood sticks, by crafting the crook part of the stick to sit deeper than the handle itself, shifting the pocket location down. The pursuit of "comfort," Jacques says, resulted in off-set technology being combined with modern plastic sticks — in the form of the Brine Edge.

"The off-set head made the ball sit lower in the general area of the head, and made it feel even better," Jacques says.

For traditionalists, if the 1970s did not represent a key turning point in the sport's history, the introduction of the Edge most certainly did — signifying the collective farewell to the stick form that had been used for many years.

Though he acknowledges that his creation could be considered a game-changer, Brine himself says the Edge effectively put an end to much of the innovation taking place in the lacrosse industry.

"I'd define it as the end of the entrepreneurial era of lacrosse," he said, sharing his take on what's been developed in the last 15 years. "Nothing significant has come since then. A lot came before it (octagonal handles, mesh for pockets, titanium shafts, helmet technology, etc.). But since then, the innovative cycle of the sport has become very flat. A lot of it has to do with the size of the industry. Large companies getting involved and the old companies getting big. Bigger companies tend to be less innovative."

Quint's Take

ESPN/IL analyst Quint Kessenich, one of IL's main voices for much of its history, will be giving his commentary on the Biggest 15 Stories.

The evolution of the stick head and pocket has dramatically changed the way the game is played.

Go back and watch game tape from the 1980s and 90s at five-year increments, and you will witness a subtle shift. It's like going bald or getting fat; it doesn't happen overnight. It's a slow demise, but extremely noticeable over time.

The offset era coupled with grippy pockets and mass usage of mesh has:

Shifted the balance of power to the ball-carrier.

Helped the game grow on a national level. Sticks come off the shelf at Dick's Sporting Goods game-ready. Any klutz from PE class can handle the twig, which has become a huge positive.

Led to the nearly complete extinction of the take-away defender.

Led to more zone defenses, and longer possession times.

The offset head and deeper pockets have led to fewer scramble groundball situations and, therefore, less transitional play.

Led to multiple versions of rules changes to speed up the game.

Led to a more violent game. Dislodging the ball is more difficult, checks have to be stronger and thrown harder.

Led to less crisp touch passing, and more isolations. Players string their pockets to shoot, not to pass.

Resulted in eye-catching, highlight-reel goals in which a player will dodge his way through and entire defense and score.

Created a generation of kids fascinated with goofy stick tricks.

Led to multiple rules changes regarding face-offs.

Enabled everyday shooters to eclipse 90 m.p.h., which eradicated screening the goalie out of safety concerns. The same high-velocity whippy pockets consistently throw the ball into the dirt and out of bounds on routine 20-yard passes.

IL's 15 Biggest

Check back to InsideLacrosse.com as we count down all 15. Want some input or have some feedback? Email mattkinnear@insidelacrosse.com.

Also, get ready for IL's 2013 slate of events: March 9 at the Whitman's Sampler Independence Classic (St. John's-Syracuse, Lehigh-Penn State and Villanova-Penn) at PPL Park in Chester, Pa.; March 16 at the Whitman's Sampler Mile High Classic (Denver-Notre Dame and Loyola-Air Force) at Sports Authority Field at Mile High in Denver, Colo.; March 23 at the Konica Minolta Face-Off Classic (Johns Hopkins-Virginia and Colgate-Navy) at M&T Bank Stadium in Baltimore, Md.; and the Konica Minolta Big City Classic (Syracuse-Notre Dame and Cornell-Princeton) at MetLife Stadium in E. Rutherford, N.J.). And don't forget IL's Powerball Lacrosse Tournament, July 12-14 at Richard Stockton College near Atlantic City, N.J.